...who got the money?
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Musical interlude
......
This body, its a vessel made of clay its a vessel made of clay when it shatters it will make no sound! Lord, I fear that day this body, its a vessel made of clay this body, its a vessel made of clay when it shatters it will make no sound! Oh lord, I fear that day one day,
One second or a blink of an eyelid one second or a blink of an eyelid how can you trust a single moment? Oh lord, I fear that day
This body, is a necklace of pearls this body, is a necklace of pearls this thread dear to this body, will break! Oh lord, I fear that day one day,
One second or a blink of an eyelid one second or a blink of an eyelid how can you trust a single moment? Oh lord, I fear that day kabir says kabir says, listen my seekers first name should only be of the lord!
This body, its a vessel made of clay its a vessel made of clay when it shatters it will make no sound! Oh lord, I fear that day
...
English Translation
The millstone of life goes on moving, Kabir weeps
Between the layers of truth and untruth, no one is spared
The millstone of life goes on moving, Kabir observes
He who holds the anchor of His name, will always remain unhurt!
Don’t leave me now, O Breath, I am a wanderer!
Still have to travel faraway lands
O the one who is asleep, awake!
Our Master has made this body like a palace,
And He played the instrument of breath within!
Our Master has made this body like a garden,
And how He’ s filled it with a bowl of flowers!
Says Kabir he who follows the truth
Will attain the kingdom of immortality!
Monday, October 29, 2018
How are we going to pay for it?
It doesn't matter whether it's Medicare for All, free college tuition, or a job guarantee, the first question asked about such proposals is how we'll pay for it. This video tells how.
The government isn’t a business or household. Democrats should reject ‘pay-go’
By Geoff Coventry
Special to The Kansas City Star
October 04, 2018 08:36 PM
In an outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats plan to pursue should they win the majority this election, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has promised to bring back the “pay-go” mandate. This rule basically means that Congress can authorize new government payments only if it “finds the money” from the private sector or cuts some other government program. In other words, it prohibits our nation from deploying our sovereign currency — the U.S. dollar — in the service of the country.
By tying her party to this misguided ordinance, Pelosi has committed a major act of self-sabotage.
To start, the “pay-go” rules established by Congress serve no public purpose. In a scathing article in The Intercept, David Dayen outlines the economic and political folly of this kind of policy. There is nothing fiscally responsible about tying public investments to tax receipts. The belief that the issuer of a currency should operate under the same rules as households and businesses is fundamentally misguided. Businesses and households alike borrow money for investing and spending, respectively. But our federal government is not like a household or a business — it makes the money it invests.
Let me be very clear: Congress has the power to create dollars. It never needs to receive back a dollar it previously created before it can create another one. It has a limitless capacity to deploy the nation’s currency in the service of public needs. Every time Congress authorizes a payment, the Department of the Treasury will make that payment via its account at the Federal Reserve. There will never be a payment that Congress authorizes that won’t be paid fully and without default, as the only way it could default is by choice.
Our nation can never run out of dollars because we create them at will. This powerful tool should not be locked in a straitjacket when there are so many needs to be met and opportunities to seize.
Now, of course we need to use the instrument of public policy responsibly. How Congress taxes is as important in shaping our economy and society as how it invests. We need to hold Congress responsible to use the nation’s monetary power to invest in the development of the nation and the well-being of its citizens.
Creating money to give away to wealthy donors, like last year’s Republican tax bill, is exactly the kind of misuse of our monetary system that should result in members of Congress losing their seats in the next election. What it should not result in is restricting the power of Congress to deploy currency in ways that will do good.
The last thing our nation needs is to replace a greedy Congress with an impotent one. Our country has enormous unmet potential. We have significant needs in areas of health care, education, community safety, urban and rural development and public infrastructure. We have a dynamic economy that can absorb and respond to injections of money from government investments without unhealthy levels of inflation, as evidenced by how our system responds to the huge cycles of private credit booms and busts.
Ultimately, Democratic leadership needs to retool its economic paradigm and stop playing political games with the American people when there is such a dire need for national investment. Yes, criticize the egregious tax cuts, but don’t hamstring the next Congress by putting our currency in a box.
Now is the time for bold leadership and a hopeful vision of what our nation can become. The public currency is our weapon of change. Use it well.
Geoff Coventry is a member of the 501(c)(4) nonprofit Patriotic Millionaires and a founder and principal of Tradewind Energy, Inc.
Read more here
Special to The Kansas City Star
October 04, 2018 08:36 PM
In an outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats plan to pursue should they win the majority this election, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has promised to bring back the “pay-go” mandate. This rule basically means that Congress can authorize new government payments only if it “finds the money” from the private sector or cuts some other government program. In other words, it prohibits our nation from deploying our sovereign currency — the U.S. dollar — in the service of the country.
By tying her party to this misguided ordinance, Pelosi has committed a major act of self-sabotage.
To start, the “pay-go” rules established by Congress serve no public purpose. In a scathing article in The Intercept, David Dayen outlines the economic and political folly of this kind of policy. There is nothing fiscally responsible about tying public investments to tax receipts. The belief that the issuer of a currency should operate under the same rules as households and businesses is fundamentally misguided. Businesses and households alike borrow money for investing and spending, respectively. But our federal government is not like a household or a business — it makes the money it invests.
Let me be very clear: Congress has the power to create dollars. It never needs to receive back a dollar it previously created before it can create another one. It has a limitless capacity to deploy the nation’s currency in the service of public needs. Every time Congress authorizes a payment, the Department of the Treasury will make that payment via its account at the Federal Reserve. There will never be a payment that Congress authorizes that won’t be paid fully and without default, as the only way it could default is by choice.
Our nation can never run out of dollars because we create them at will. This powerful tool should not be locked in a straitjacket when there are so many needs to be met and opportunities to seize.
Now, of course we need to use the instrument of public policy responsibly. How Congress taxes is as important in shaping our economy and society as how it invests. We need to hold Congress responsible to use the nation’s monetary power to invest in the development of the nation and the well-being of its citizens.
Creating money to give away to wealthy donors, like last year’s Republican tax bill, is exactly the kind of misuse of our monetary system that should result in members of Congress losing their seats in the next election. What it should not result in is restricting the power of Congress to deploy currency in ways that will do good.
The last thing our nation needs is to replace a greedy Congress with an impotent one. Our country has enormous unmet potential. We have significant needs in areas of health care, education, community safety, urban and rural development and public infrastructure. We have a dynamic economy that can absorb and respond to injections of money from government investments without unhealthy levels of inflation, as evidenced by how our system responds to the huge cycles of private credit booms and busts.
Ultimately, Democratic leadership needs to retool its economic paradigm and stop playing political games with the American people when there is such a dire need for national investment. Yes, criticize the egregious tax cuts, but don’t hamstring the next Congress by putting our currency in a box.
Now is the time for bold leadership and a hopeful vision of what our nation can become. The public currency is our weapon of change. Use it well.
Geoff Coventry is a member of the 501(c)(4) nonprofit Patriotic Millionaires and a founder and principal of Tradewind Energy, Inc.
Read more here
Deficit Owls Newsletter - Modern Money Theory Makes the Big Time
Introduction
Welcome
to the October 2018 edition of the Deficit Owls Monthly Newsletter. Our
hope is to keep you updated on the latest happenings in the world of
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): the best articles, videos, podcasts,
events, and more over the past month.
MMT
presents a coherent alternative to orthodox macroeconomics, the latter
of which has proved to be a disastrous failure ultimately bringing us to
this era of slow growth, stagnant wages, and virulent political anger.
The proponents of Modern Money hope to upend the status quo with a new
theory that can explain how we can create shared prosperity. If you are
new to MMT, here's a quick explainer.
It's been a while since we've spoken and a lot has happened, so let's get into it!
It's been a while since we've spoken and a lot has happened, so let's get into it!
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Saturday, October 27, 2018
What you fight grows stronger; what you resist persists
Matt Taibbi talks about this in detail, long form in his new book. Excerpt:
The trend toward nastier language was based on a faulty syllogism:
Trump was uncivil, and did win, but about the last thing in the world any sane person would advise is following his example.
During the race, I kept trying to imagine how someone like Martin Luther King would have responded to Trump. I don’t think the answer would have been, “We need to start saying fuck more.”
Does Stephen Miller have the right to enjoy an enchilada in peace? I have no idea. Probably not. Is this a question of earth-shattering importance? Also probably not.
The incivility movement is not about politics. It’s about money and audience. In a hyper-competitive media environment where a billion pieces of content per day are created on platforms like Facebook, one has to work overdrive to win eyeballs.
The problem is, there’s no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable TV will eventually become 700 separate 24-hour porn channels, news and commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style expletive-laden pre-fight tirades, and open incitement of violence.
If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. It would be illogical to argue anything else. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.
....
In other words...divide and rule.
The trend toward nastier language was based on a faulty syllogism:
- Civility got us nowhere.
- The uncivil Donald Trump won.
- Therefore, we must be uncivil to win.
Trump was uncivil, and did win, but about the last thing in the world any sane person would advise is following his example.
During the race, I kept trying to imagine how someone like Martin Luther King would have responded to Trump. I don’t think the answer would have been, “We need to start saying fuck more.”
Does Stephen Miller have the right to enjoy an enchilada in peace? I have no idea. Probably not. Is this a question of earth-shattering importance? Also probably not.
The incivility movement is not about politics. It’s about money and audience. In a hyper-competitive media environment where a billion pieces of content per day are created on platforms like Facebook, one has to work overdrive to win eyeballs.
The problem is, there’s no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable TV will eventually become 700 separate 24-hour porn channels, news and commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style expletive-laden pre-fight tirades, and open incitement of violence.
If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. It would be illogical to argue anything else. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.
....
In other words...divide and rule.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Partisan Frenzy Rules Washington, but Does it Have to Rule Americans?
...a look at the origins of partisanship from the Institute for New Economic Thinking
By Lynn Parramore
OCT 22, 2018
To connect across difference is the only thing that will save us from rule by the privileged few.
Recently, my Facebook page featured a post by a Republican acquaintance listing reasons why Democrats are the morally degenerate enemies of America. He’s the neighbor of a relative of mine—a passionate Democrat of the sort who posts campaign signs in her yard. This is the same neighbor he treats to fresh lettuces from his garden and cherishes for her plucky personality.
How can the doting neighbor and the bitter partisan be the same person?
According to social scientists, very easily. Humans have a knack for holding contradictory attitudes and shifting seamlessly among them. Social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and others have studied the way people make judgments and form perceptions, finding that we are guided by an array of mental and emotional forces that apply depending on context and situation. Most of this is beyond our conscious awareness.
When we post on social media, we are guided by one set of forces, different from those at play when we meet a neighbor face-to-face. In one context, we are focused on what divides us, in the other on what we share.
The conventional wisdom media insists that the country is degenerating hopelessly into warring factions: blue v. red; white working class v. people of color; centrists v. insurgents; left v. right; millennials v. boomers; men v. women. While pundits proclaim America broken, we tend to forget something expressed by the poet Maya Angelou: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
Feeling is First
Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild found evidence for this human flexibility while doing research in Louisiana bayou country. A lifelong blue-stater, she wanted to know what motivated red-state voters to reject federal solutions to serious problems that dogged their communities, a phenomenon she calls the “Great Paradox.” How, for example, could a voter be drawn to Big Oil-supported candidates when the companies that fund them turned their beloved bayous into toxic waste dumps, destroyed jobs in fishing and tourism, and drained public coffers? Why vote for what hurts you?
Unsatisfied with popular answers, she headed down to southwestern Louisiana, near the Gulf of Mexico, where from 2011 to 2016 Hochschild interviewed several dozen white, Christian, middle-aged and older people from both blue collar and white collar backgrounds, 40 of whom were Tea Party supporters. At their kitchen tables and workplaces, she learned from them what media accounts often miss.
Instead of intolerant bigots, she found people who treated her with friendly, often bemused, curiosity. Rather than caring little for the less fortunate or the environment, those she spoke to wanted good jobs, clean water, and to help those in need. They set a high store on community, fairness, resilience, and hard work—values much of the country would share.
Not that there weren’t any differences. These Louisianans tended to define community as the home and the church instead of the public square that means so much to San Franciscans. They expressed disdain for the government the way Bay Area hipsters scorn consumerism. For many, making sure that their kids attend a good church was more important than earning a spot at a fancy school. They felt pride to be rooted in a thick, stable community of relatives, co-parishioners, and friends. To them the cosmopolitan life seemed precarious and alienated.
They pointed to the failures in the public sector more readily than abuses in the private sector. When these right-leaning people thought about economic unfairness, they focused their attention down the class ladder (between the middle class and the poor), rather than up (between the top and the rest) as people on the left tend to do. “Ironically,” Hochschild notes, “both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.”
Southwestern Louisianans also carried what Hochschild calls a “deep story” of their American experience that was distinct from other regions. A deep story, as she defines it, is an emotion-driven inner narrative that informs how we see the world and ourselves. For the people she got to know, that story often involved a sense of shame, betrayal, and having been cast aside.
Emotional self-interest, Hochschild found, can be a stronger motivating factor than economic self-interest. One woman told the sociologist that she liked Rush Limbaugh because he defends her from the insults of liberals. “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers,” the woman said. “They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.”
People naturally seek release from unpleasant emotions. Charismatic leaders who understand deep stories can offer that release. That’s why, Hochschild observes, Donald Trump acts as an “antidepressant” at rallies in a region routinely mocked by coastal city-dwellers.
In a place where the shameful history of the plantation system hovers, a Big Oil executive who promises dazzling new facilities and high-dollar jobs delivers a feeling of pride restored, of future prosperity. On the contrary, being told that they should rely on government money to alleviate problems caused by such developments triggers a sense of shame in people.
No matter what our politics, human beings seek fairness, security, and dignity. We yearn for status in our own eyes and in those of our community. We are creatures who yearn for comfort when we are hurt and someone to blame when we are angry. Most of the time we want to help our neighbors and to show kindness to strangers. We want love, whether we were the supporters of Hillary Clinton who raised “Love Trumps Hate” signs in the 2016 campaign or Trump backers who swam in the “sea of love” the president described at his inauguration.
And none of us likes it when we are told we are feeling the wrong feelings.
Climbing Over the Empathy Wall
Hochschild’s 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” is the account of a struggle to scale what she calls the “empathy wall”—the mental and emotional blocks which prevent us from seeing through the eyes of others. Part of the challenge involves understanding the ways in which we are connected.
We need each other, but we often don’t see each other. Hochschild notes that blue coastal cities need red state resources, but are too distanced from what it takes to procure them. Liberals from New York might be happy to use great quantities of oil to fuel their jet-setting lives, but they don’t have to live with the pollution caused by the production of this oil: Louisianans do. Blue-staters, she finds, could do with understanding more about what community means to people in other parts of the country, while red-staters could benefit from reaching out to a larger world.
Climbing the empathy wall is challenging, but the reward is hope. On both sides, Hochschild observes, people “wrongly imagine that empathy with the ‘other’ side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.”
The sociologist found that on issue after issue, differences are real, but not immutable. Possibilities for practical cooperation become apparent once people start talking to one another. One deeply conservative woman who stressed the dignity of work expressed an idea that would have sounded right to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers: “If there aren’t jobs around,” she said, “well, get people working on highways…” To such a person, solutions in the form of jobs programs or training have a stronger chance of sounding palatable than other remedies.
In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Hochschild said that she found strong interest in renewable energy among Louisianans. However, talk tended to shut down when the suggestion of government investment came up. On a fishing trip with one of her Louisiana friends (she calls them friends in the book), a surprising path of connection came up through a discussion of fairness, namely, how it didn’t seem fair that California enjoyed relatively clean air and water and Louisiana suffered with pollution. It was the social self, not the economic self that mattered in the conversation. Once the idea of fairness was extended into the issue of pollution, people were able to shift out their default political framework.
Evidence for What Binds Us
Poll after poll reflects Americans’ common values and concerns.
Most want people to have a safety net: A 2017 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that only 12% support cuts to Medicaid, while a 2016 Public Policy Polling survey found that the majority of Americans want to expand Social Security, regardless of age, race, gender, or party affiliation. Most want more economic fairness: A 2017 Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that three quarters think the rich should pay more taxes, while a Pew survey the same year revealed that 62 percent are deeply troubled that “some corporations” don’t pay their share. Pew also reported in 2017 that a substantial majority sees economic inequality as either a very big or moderately big problem.
Americans care about nature: In 2018, Gallup showed that most want the government to do more to protect the environment. Even the most polarizing issues reveal commonalities: A 2016 Pew survey found that 69% do not want Roe v. Wade overturned.
Surveys also reveal shared frustrations, particularly when it comes to institutions. In 2017, Pew reported that only 18% of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington. 2018 polling data demonstrate that only 14 percent have a “great deal” of confidence in banks. A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed that Americans have limited faith in big business, the presidency, the political parties and the media. A dismal 13% were found to trust the Democratic Party, and even fewer, 10%, had faith in the GOP. Congress elicited trust among just 8% of people. We may claim strong tribal affiliations to political parties, but we are frequently exasperated and annoyed by those tribes.
Hochschild points out that even in what is commonly considered the hopeless factional realm of Congress, members across the aisle have been able to come to agreement on issues like the need to reduce the prison population—something that might have sounded impossible in the recent past. She notes that one strategy to getting past partisan blocks is what she calls a “symbol stretch”—identifying cherished symbols, like freedom or patriotism, and expanding them in such a way that you include the listener. She gives an example of one Louisiana man concerned about pollution giving a talk to conservative businessmen who expressed little interest environmental matters but deep concerns about freedom—the freedom to invest and freedom to get rich. By describing a fisherman as lacking the freedom to procure uncontaminated fish, he gained the audience’s attention.
Hochschild observes that we all live in bubbles, and that it is imperative to get out of them. Change the situation and the context and you change how people respond to matters that are not as settled as they appear. She points to efforts like Bridge Alliance, a coalition of more than 90 organizations across the country committed to figuring out how to revitalize democratic practice—an effort that requires people with different perspectives and backgrounds meeting each other, speaking to each other, and activating the processes that encourage human beings to explore what they have in common.
In the current climate, Americans across the political spectrum feel alienated from a system that fails to represent what most of us want. People intuitively understand what research by political scientists like Ben Page and Thomas Ferguson have revealed: that the system has been taken over by a privileged few and grows more rife with exploitation and unfairness.
On the left and the right, Americans have become strangers in their own land. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to remember our shared fate and seize the possibilities of our flexible human perspectives. That’s the last thing the enemies of democracy want to see happen. a
By Lynn Parramore
OCT 22, 2018
To connect across difference is the only thing that will save us from rule by the privileged few.
Recently, my Facebook page featured a post by a Republican acquaintance listing reasons why Democrats are the morally degenerate enemies of America. He’s the neighbor of a relative of mine—a passionate Democrat of the sort who posts campaign signs in her yard. This is the same neighbor he treats to fresh lettuces from his garden and cherishes for her plucky personality.
How can the doting neighbor and the bitter partisan be the same person?
According to social scientists, very easily. Humans have a knack for holding contradictory attitudes and shifting seamlessly among them. Social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and others have studied the way people make judgments and form perceptions, finding that we are guided by an array of mental and emotional forces that apply depending on context and situation. Most of this is beyond our conscious awareness.
When we post on social media, we are guided by one set of forces, different from those at play when we meet a neighbor face-to-face. In one context, we are focused on what divides us, in the other on what we share.
The conventional wisdom media insists that the country is degenerating hopelessly into warring factions: blue v. red; white working class v. people of color; centrists v. insurgents; left v. right; millennials v. boomers; men v. women. While pundits proclaim America broken, we tend to forget something expressed by the poet Maya Angelou: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
Feeling is First
Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild found evidence for this human flexibility while doing research in Louisiana bayou country. A lifelong blue-stater, she wanted to know what motivated red-state voters to reject federal solutions to serious problems that dogged their communities, a phenomenon she calls the “Great Paradox.” How, for example, could a voter be drawn to Big Oil-supported candidates when the companies that fund them turned their beloved bayous into toxic waste dumps, destroyed jobs in fishing and tourism, and drained public coffers? Why vote for what hurts you?
Unsatisfied with popular answers, she headed down to southwestern Louisiana, near the Gulf of Mexico, where from 2011 to 2016 Hochschild interviewed several dozen white, Christian, middle-aged and older people from both blue collar and white collar backgrounds, 40 of whom were Tea Party supporters. At their kitchen tables and workplaces, she learned from them what media accounts often miss.
Instead of intolerant bigots, she found people who treated her with friendly, often bemused, curiosity. Rather than caring little for the less fortunate or the environment, those she spoke to wanted good jobs, clean water, and to help those in need. They set a high store on community, fairness, resilience, and hard work—values much of the country would share.
Not that there weren’t any differences. These Louisianans tended to define community as the home and the church instead of the public square that means so much to San Franciscans. They expressed disdain for the government the way Bay Area hipsters scorn consumerism. For many, making sure that their kids attend a good church was more important than earning a spot at a fancy school. They felt pride to be rooted in a thick, stable community of relatives, co-parishioners, and friends. To them the cosmopolitan life seemed precarious and alienated.
They pointed to the failures in the public sector more readily than abuses in the private sector. When these right-leaning people thought about economic unfairness, they focused their attention down the class ladder (between the middle class and the poor), rather than up (between the top and the rest) as people on the left tend to do. “Ironically,” Hochschild notes, “both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.”
Southwestern Louisianans also carried what Hochschild calls a “deep story” of their American experience that was distinct from other regions. A deep story, as she defines it, is an emotion-driven inner narrative that informs how we see the world and ourselves. For the people she got to know, that story often involved a sense of shame, betrayal, and having been cast aside.
Emotional self-interest, Hochschild found, can be a stronger motivating factor than economic self-interest. One woman told the sociologist that she liked Rush Limbaugh because he defends her from the insults of liberals. “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers,” the woman said. “They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.”
People naturally seek release from unpleasant emotions. Charismatic leaders who understand deep stories can offer that release. That’s why, Hochschild observes, Donald Trump acts as an “antidepressant” at rallies in a region routinely mocked by coastal city-dwellers.
In a place where the shameful history of the plantation system hovers, a Big Oil executive who promises dazzling new facilities and high-dollar jobs delivers a feeling of pride restored, of future prosperity. On the contrary, being told that they should rely on government money to alleviate problems caused by such developments triggers a sense of shame in people.
No matter what our politics, human beings seek fairness, security, and dignity. We yearn for status in our own eyes and in those of our community. We are creatures who yearn for comfort when we are hurt and someone to blame when we are angry. Most of the time we want to help our neighbors and to show kindness to strangers. We want love, whether we were the supporters of Hillary Clinton who raised “Love Trumps Hate” signs in the 2016 campaign or Trump backers who swam in the “sea of love” the president described at his inauguration.
And none of us likes it when we are told we are feeling the wrong feelings.
Climbing Over the Empathy Wall
Hochschild’s 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” is the account of a struggle to scale what she calls the “empathy wall”—the mental and emotional blocks which prevent us from seeing through the eyes of others. Part of the challenge involves understanding the ways in which we are connected.
We need each other, but we often don’t see each other. Hochschild notes that blue coastal cities need red state resources, but are too distanced from what it takes to procure them. Liberals from New York might be happy to use great quantities of oil to fuel their jet-setting lives, but they don’t have to live with the pollution caused by the production of this oil: Louisianans do. Blue-staters, she finds, could do with understanding more about what community means to people in other parts of the country, while red-staters could benefit from reaching out to a larger world.
Climbing the empathy wall is challenging, but the reward is hope. On both sides, Hochschild observes, people “wrongly imagine that empathy with the ‘other’ side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.”
The sociologist found that on issue after issue, differences are real, but not immutable. Possibilities for practical cooperation become apparent once people start talking to one another. One deeply conservative woman who stressed the dignity of work expressed an idea that would have sounded right to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers: “If there aren’t jobs around,” she said, “well, get people working on highways…” To such a person, solutions in the form of jobs programs or training have a stronger chance of sounding palatable than other remedies.
In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Hochschild said that she found strong interest in renewable energy among Louisianans. However, talk tended to shut down when the suggestion of government investment came up. On a fishing trip with one of her Louisiana friends (she calls them friends in the book), a surprising path of connection came up through a discussion of fairness, namely, how it didn’t seem fair that California enjoyed relatively clean air and water and Louisiana suffered with pollution. It was the social self, not the economic self that mattered in the conversation. Once the idea of fairness was extended into the issue of pollution, people were able to shift out their default political framework.
Evidence for What Binds Us
Poll after poll reflects Americans’ common values and concerns.
Most want people to have a safety net: A 2017 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that only 12% support cuts to Medicaid, while a 2016 Public Policy Polling survey found that the majority of Americans want to expand Social Security, regardless of age, race, gender, or party affiliation. Most want more economic fairness: A 2017 Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that three quarters think the rich should pay more taxes, while a Pew survey the same year revealed that 62 percent are deeply troubled that “some corporations” don’t pay their share. Pew also reported in 2017 that a substantial majority sees economic inequality as either a very big or moderately big problem.
Americans care about nature: In 2018, Gallup showed that most want the government to do more to protect the environment. Even the most polarizing issues reveal commonalities: A 2016 Pew survey found that 69% do not want Roe v. Wade overturned.
Surveys also reveal shared frustrations, particularly when it comes to institutions. In 2017, Pew reported that only 18% of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington. 2018 polling data demonstrate that only 14 percent have a “great deal” of confidence in banks. A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed that Americans have limited faith in big business, the presidency, the political parties and the media. A dismal 13% were found to trust the Democratic Party, and even fewer, 10%, had faith in the GOP. Congress elicited trust among just 8% of people. We may claim strong tribal affiliations to political parties, but we are frequently exasperated and annoyed by those tribes.
Hochschild points out that even in what is commonly considered the hopeless factional realm of Congress, members across the aisle have been able to come to agreement on issues like the need to reduce the prison population—something that might have sounded impossible in the recent past. She notes that one strategy to getting past partisan blocks is what she calls a “symbol stretch”—identifying cherished symbols, like freedom or patriotism, and expanding them in such a way that you include the listener. She gives an example of one Louisiana man concerned about pollution giving a talk to conservative businessmen who expressed little interest environmental matters but deep concerns about freedom—the freedom to invest and freedom to get rich. By describing a fisherman as lacking the freedom to procure uncontaminated fish, he gained the audience’s attention.
Hochschild observes that we all live in bubbles, and that it is imperative to get out of them. Change the situation and the context and you change how people respond to matters that are not as settled as they appear. She points to efforts like Bridge Alliance, a coalition of more than 90 organizations across the country committed to figuring out how to revitalize democratic practice—an effort that requires people with different perspectives and backgrounds meeting each other, speaking to each other, and activating the processes that encourage human beings to explore what they have in common.
In the current climate, Americans across the political spectrum feel alienated from a system that fails to represent what most of us want. People intuitively understand what research by political scientists like Ben Page and Thomas Ferguson have revealed: that the system has been taken over by a privileged few and grows more rife with exploitation and unfairness.
On the left and the right, Americans have become strangers in their own land. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to remember our shared fate and seize the possibilities of our flexible human perspectives. That’s the last thing the enemies of democracy want to see happen. a
Monday, October 22, 2018
Four More Questions about Money
The Washington Post warns us about the dangers of "Trump ... awash in a sea of red ink" (Retitled by McClatchy as "The nation's exploding deficit and our future.") Mainstream media can only continue to publish such fictions because it refuses to understand how currency works. To bring readers up to date, here are some clarifications (this follows Four Questions about Money).
1. Q: Is the Government running Out of Money?
A: Is the scorekeeper running out of points? Both questions make about the same amount of sense. Modern economies use fiat money, not tied to or limited by a commodity like gold. Money is a measurement of obligation, debt or credit, not a thing. Notice, incidentally, that even gold-backed currency is an IOU...in this case "I owe you a lump of gold."
2. Q: Doesn't Government need to collect taxes to provision itself?
A: Not a sovereign, fiat money creator (with a floating exchange rate). Governments like the U.S. create the money, and have no need for tax revenues to fund their programs. If you paid your taxes at the Treasury Building, after marking your obligation "Paid," their employees would shred the dollars.
Believing the government has to collect money to provision itself overlooks logic, too. Government has to spend the dollars, before it can ask for some back in taxes. Where would taxpayers get the dollars with which they pay taxes if government didn't spend them out into the economy first?
Bonus question: What's another name for all the dollar financial assets the government does not retrieve in taxes, but leaves out in the economy? Answer: National "Debt."
3. Q: If government doesn't need the money, why have taxes?
A: To make the money valuable. Dollars retire an inevitable liability; that is why they are valuable. Taxes are necessary, they just do not provision the government that issues the money.
4. Q: Wouldn't making all these printed dollars lead to inflation, even hyperinflation?
A: In theory, it's a possibility. In practice, it never happens. First of all, simply creating money does not cause inflation. According to its own audit, the Federal Reserve (the U.S. Central Bank) created $16 - $29 trillion to bail out the financial sector in 2007-8. It still has $4 trillion in troubled assets on its books, dating from that time. So...where's the inflation? No indicator, like the Consumer Price Index (government), or MIT's "Billion-price Index" (semi-public) or Shadowstat's (private) inflation indicator shows a surge of inflation then.
The (Koch-funded) Cato Institute published a study of 56 inflationary episodes throughout human history. Says economist Stephanie Kelton*: "Not a single one of … the 56 cases were caused by a central bank that ran amok. In virtually every case, the inflation was not caused by too much money but too few goods." In the most famous of often-cited hyperinflations, farming collapsed in Zimbabwe as Rhodesian farmers left, leading to a food shortage, and France annexed the industrial Ruhr depriving Weimar Germany of manufactured goods while it had foreign currency-denominated reparations to pay. "Inflation is overwhelmingly driven by cost-push variables... Printing money just doesn't do it. If it did, Japan would have exploded decades ago, because they've been trying quantitative easing for nearly 20 years, and they can't move the needle on inflation. We've been trying it here in the U.S. for about five years, and Bernanke can't even hit his 2% [inflation] target."
...
This means all of the "we're out of money" excuses explaining why we cannot have nice things are false. We can fix global warming, have free college tuition, universal healthcare, guarantee a living-wage job for every able-bodied unemployed person, and produce a golden age. We have the money to do it, if we want it. All of the panic-stricken excitement about national debt is just propaganda designed to disempower the population, subjecting them to debt peonage.
*Kelton was an advisor to the Senate Budget committee.
The Real Pension Problem
From The Intercept's coverage of the Illinois Governor's race:
Speaking of the Republican candidate, who is ignoring solutions to the pension problem in the state: “He doesn’t want to solve the problem because the pension is the battering ram he’s using to try and break the public unions,” Martire said. “He needs to keep spinning the pension problem because he needs the unfunded pension liability to make the case that it’s the public unions that are destroying things in every state.”
If you want more about pensions, generally, especially the reason that 70% of America's workforce used to have defined benefit pensions, but does not have them any more, recommended reading is Ellen Schultz's Retirement Heist. Executive summary: While defined benefit pensions are roughly twice as remunerative as defined contribution (IRA, 401K) plans, corporate America raided its pension plans to goose profits, stock prices and CEO compensation. Public sector workers have the few remaining defined benefit plans.
Speaking of the Republican candidate, who is ignoring solutions to the pension problem in the state: “He doesn’t want to solve the problem because the pension is the battering ram he’s using to try and break the public unions,” Martire said. “He needs to keep spinning the pension problem because he needs the unfunded pension liability to make the case that it’s the public unions that are destroying things in every state.”
If you want more about pensions, generally, especially the reason that 70% of America's workforce used to have defined benefit pensions, but does not have them any more, recommended reading is Ellen Schultz's Retirement Heist. Executive summary: While defined benefit pensions are roughly twice as remunerative as defined contribution (IRA, 401K) plans, corporate America raided its pension plans to goose profits, stock prices and CEO compensation. Public sector workers have the few remaining defined benefit plans.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Four Questions about Money
© by Mark Dempsey (See also Four More Questions About Money)
The Washington Post sternly warns us about the dangers of "Trump ... awash in a sea of red ink" (Retitled by McClatchy as "The nation's exploding deficit and our future.") Mainstream media can only continue to publish such fiction because it refuses to understand how currency works. To bring readers up to date, here are some clarifications.
1. Q: What is money, exactly?
A: It's an IOU, a marker for debt. This explanation often puzzles people, until they understand the way bank debt works. If you have a bank account, that's your asset, but to the bank, it's a liability (debt).
Writing a check assigns a portion of the bank's debt to the payee. Currency is checks made out to "cash" in fixed amounts. Dollars appear in our central bank's accounting as debt, too. In fact, the dollars themselves say they are "Federal Reserve Notes," and "note" is the legal term for a debt. Dollars are the equivalent of a non-interest-bearing checking account, while Treasury Bills and Bonds are the equivalent of savings accounts.
Ask yourself whether you would join a mob of depositors with torches and pitchforks confronting the bank manager where you kept your deposits, demanding that he reduce the bank's debt (i.e. the size of your accounts) by increasing bank fees and reducing interest paid on savings. That's what the National "Debt" anxiety promotes. Not really sensible, is it?
2. Q: What is National "Debt," then?
A: It's like bank debt, not household debt. That means National "Debt" is actually the sum of the nation's dollar financial assets. Like those bank accounts, it is the savings of the population. Reduce National "Debt," and those savings diminish too, making the economy more fragile, and the population even more at the mercy of creditors.
3. Q: Does reducing National "Debt" (the cumulative sum of deficits) Make Sense?
A: Sometimes. Modern Money Theory economics founder and former bank operations officer Warren Mosler compares deficits to a thermostat. Sometimes you want the economy to heat up (with bigger deficits) and sometimes you want it to cool down (smaller deficits).
It is important that the deficit exist, most often, because the economy constantly creates things of value. Adam Smith's example of economic activity was adding value by carving an axe handle from a fallen tree limb. If the economy continues to add value, but the number of dollars in circulation shrinks, deflation occurs. Creditors love deflation because they are repaid with more valuable money, but it crushes debtors and often coincides with serious economic downturns.
Historically, the U.S. has reduced its deficit significantly seven times since 1776. The last such reduction was the Clinton surplus. The reduction before that occurred in 1929. Andrew Jackson even paid the entire National "Debt" off in 1835.
While ascribing causality is difficult in any system as complex as the U.S. economy, a Great Depression-sized hole followed every one of those significant deficit reductions. In the above examples, the Great Recession, the Great Depression and the Panic of 1837.
Meanwhile, both political left and right continue to publish calls to reduce the "Debt" like NPR's story: "Despite Strong Economy, Federal Deficit Soars"... But larger Federal deficits heat up the economy!
4. Q: Why would anyone promote National "Debt" reduction?
A: To take advantage of the distress. When people cannot pay their obligations because their savings have been reduced, then a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures is the result (that Great Depression). Vulture capitalists can then pick up these distressed assets cheaply.
One of the biggest promoters of the reduce-the-National-"Debt" meme was Pete Peterson. His Blackstone Group is now one of the biggest landlords in the nation, thanks to all the foreclosed properties it bought. For its next step, Blackstone raised rents, and started to sell off its properties at the recovery-based price. If Peterson's heirs succeed again in reducing the population's savings, we can look forward to a repeat of this procedure, and even more people reduced to debt peonage.
Mark Dempsey is an instructor in the CSUS Renaissance (Senior) education program, and a Modern Money Theory Maven.
The Washington Post sternly warns us about the dangers of "Trump ... awash in a sea of red ink" (Retitled by McClatchy as "The nation's exploding deficit and our future.") Mainstream media can only continue to publish such fiction because it refuses to understand how currency works. To bring readers up to date, here are some clarifications.
1. Q: What is money, exactly?
A: It's an IOU, a marker for debt. This explanation often puzzles people, until they understand the way bank debt works. If you have a bank account, that's your asset, but to the bank, it's a liability (debt).
Writing a check assigns a portion of the bank's debt to the payee. Currency is checks made out to "cash" in fixed amounts. Dollars appear in our central bank's accounting as debt, too. In fact, the dollars themselves say they are "Federal Reserve Notes," and "note" is the legal term for a debt. Dollars are the equivalent of a non-interest-bearing checking account, while Treasury Bills and Bonds are the equivalent of savings accounts.
Ask yourself whether you would join a mob of depositors with torches and pitchforks confronting the bank manager where you kept your deposits, demanding that he reduce the bank's debt (i.e. the size of your accounts) by increasing bank fees and reducing interest paid on savings. That's what the National "Debt" anxiety promotes. Not really sensible, is it?
2. Q: What is National "Debt," then?
A: It's like bank debt, not household debt. That means National "Debt" is actually the sum of the nation's dollar financial assets. Like those bank accounts, it is the savings of the population. Reduce National "Debt," and those savings diminish too, making the economy more fragile, and the population even more at the mercy of creditors.
3. Q: Does reducing National "Debt" (the cumulative sum of deficits) Make Sense?
A: Sometimes. Modern Money Theory economics founder and former bank operations officer Warren Mosler compares deficits to a thermostat. Sometimes you want the economy to heat up (with bigger deficits) and sometimes you want it to cool down (smaller deficits).
It is important that the deficit exist, most often, because the economy constantly creates things of value. Adam Smith's example of economic activity was adding value by carving an axe handle from a fallen tree limb. If the economy continues to add value, but the number of dollars in circulation shrinks, deflation occurs. Creditors love deflation because they are repaid with more valuable money, but it crushes debtors and often coincides with serious economic downturns.
Historically, the U.S. has reduced its deficit significantly seven times since 1776. The last such reduction was the Clinton surplus. The reduction before that occurred in 1929. Andrew Jackson even paid the entire National "Debt" off in 1835.
While ascribing causality is difficult in any system as complex as the U.S. economy, a Great Depression-sized hole followed every one of those significant deficit reductions. In the above examples, the Great Recession, the Great Depression and the Panic of 1837.
Meanwhile, both political left and right continue to publish calls to reduce the "Debt" like NPR's story: "Despite Strong Economy, Federal Deficit Soars"... But larger Federal deficits heat up the economy!
4. Q: Why would anyone promote National "Debt" reduction?
A: To take advantage of the distress. When people cannot pay their obligations because their savings have been reduced, then a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures is the result (that Great Depression). Vulture capitalists can then pick up these distressed assets cheaply.
One of the biggest promoters of the reduce-the-National-"Debt" meme was Pete Peterson. His Blackstone Group is now one of the biggest landlords in the nation, thanks to all the foreclosed properties it bought. For its next step, Blackstone raised rents, and started to sell off its properties at the recovery-based price. If Peterson's heirs succeed again in reducing the population's savings, we can look forward to a repeat of this procedure, and even more people reduced to debt peonage.
Mark Dempsey is an instructor in the CSUS Renaissance (Senior) education program, and a Modern Money Theory Maven.
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